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At the Center for Public Integrity, a five-part investigative series on safety at the nation’s nuclear facilities finds that workers can and do suffer serious injuries, yet the Department of Energy typically imposes only minimal fines for safety incidents and companies get to keep a majority of their profits, which does little to improve working conditions. Reporters estimated that the number of safety incidents has tripled since 2013.
For example, in 2009, the chair of a safety committee at Idaho National Laboratory told high-ranking managers that damaged plutonium plates could put workers…

At the Guardian, Krithika Varagur interviewed workers inside the Indonesian factory that manufactures clothing for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, finding poverty wages, anti-union intimidation and unreasonably high production targets. The story includes interviews with more than a dozen workers, who asked that details about their identities be changed to avoid being fired. Varagur writes:
Alia is nothing if not industrious. She has worked in factories on and off since leaving her provincial high school, through the birth of two children, leading up to her current job making clothes for brands…

At ProPublica, Michael Grabell investigates how U.S. companies take advantage of immigrant workers, focusing on Case Farms poultry plants, which former OSHA chief David Michaels once described as “an outrageously dangerous place to work.” He reports that Case Farms built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants, who often end up working in the kind of dangerous and abusive conditions that few Americans would put up with.
Grabell chronicles the history of Case Farms and how it first began recruiting refugees from Guatemala who were fleeing a brutal civil war in…

At the Center for Public Integrity, Talia Buford and Maryam Jameel investigate federal contractors that receive billions in public funds despite committing wage violations against their workers. In analyzing Department of Labor data on more than 1,100 egregious violators, the reporters found that federal agencies modified or granted contracts totaling $18 billion to 68 contractors with proven wage violations. The Department of Defense contracted with the most wage violators.
Under Obama, labor officials had attempted to address the problem with the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which…

At the American Prospect, Justin Miller interviews Obama-era Labor Department officials on the future of worker protections under President Trump. Miller takes a behind-the-scenes peek at what it took to pass some of the Obama administration’s key labor rules, discusses the nomination of Andy Puzder to become the nation’s next labor secretary, and addresses rumors that the new administration might be gunning to abolish some Labor Department divisions entirely. Miller writes:
Not surprisingly, Obama’s top labor alums express pride in the many worker protections they were able to put in place…

The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on May 23, is one of our favorite posts from 2016.
by Kim Krisberg
Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers.
About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a…

At In These Times, Elizabeth Grossman writes about whether workplace safety will survive a Trump presidency, noting that “Trump’s transition team has said he will introduce a moratorium on new regulations and cancel executive orders and regulations ‘that kill jobs and bloat government.’” In interviewing labor, health and safety advocates, Grossman writes that a number of federal protections could land on the chopping block, including the new overtime rule, proposed beryllium rule and fall protections. Grossman writes:
How does Trump’s promise to reduce and eliminate regulations square with…

Two new reports describe the working conditions for some of the 21 million workers in the U.S. food industry. Food workers constitute 14 percent of the U.S. workforce. They are employed across the system from those who work on farms and in canning plants, to meat packers, grocery store clerks and restaurant dishwashers.
No Piece of the Pie: U.S. Food Workers in 2016 was released this week by the Food Chain Workers Alliance. The report examines employment trends, wages, advancement opportunities, discrimination, and work-related injuries. The authors use government and industry data, but…

In September 2015, New York farmworker Crispin Hernandez was fired after his employers saw him talking with local workers’ rights advocates. But instead of backing down, Hernandez filed suit against the state. And if he prevails, it could help transform the often dangerous and unjust workplace conditions that farmworkers face to put food on all of our tables.
Officially filed May 10, 2016, Hernandez v. State of New York demands that the state provide the same constitutional protections to farmworkers as it does for other workers. Right now, according to the New York state constitution, all…

At the Denver Post, John Ingold and Monte Whaley authored a year-long investigative series into the dangerous conditions facing Colorado’s oil and gas workers, the role of subcontracting in heightening worker safety risks, and the lack of employer accountability and oversight. The series, “Drilling through danger,” noted that 1,333 workers died in the nation’s oil and gas fields between 2003 and 2014, with 2014 being the second-most lethal year for oil and gas workers in Colorado in a decade. According to the newspaper’s analysis, there was about one oil and gas worker death per every 12 rigs…

In “The Invisible Workforce: Death, discrimination and despair in N.J.'s temp industry,” NJ Advance Media reporter Kelly Heyboer investigated conditions facing temp workers in New Jersey, which now has one of the largest concentrations of temp workers in the nation. She reports that growing demand for temp workers has led to the proliferation of “temp towns” — places with dozens of temp agencies and neighborhoods full of temp workers, many of whom report low pay, wage theft, racial and sexual discrimination, and unsafe workplaces.
Heyboer writes:
The temp agencies in New Brunswick are easy to…

Despite all the concern about shuttered businesses, fired employees and lost profits, a new report has found that New York City’s paid sick leave law was pretty much a “non-event” for most employers.
Released this month, “No Big Deal: The Impact of New York City’s Paid Sick Law on Employers” reported that in the years following the 2014 implementation of the paid sick leave law, the great majority of businesses surveyed said the law had no effect on overall costs. The report, authored by researchers at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Murphy Institute at the City University…

In a new national survey, about one in every four U.S. workers rates their workplace as just “fair” or “poor” in providing a healthy working environment. And employees in low-paying jobs typically report worse working conditions than those in higher-paying jobs — in fact, nearly half of workers in low-paying jobs say they face “potentially dangerous” conditions on the job.
Released earlier this month, results from the new Workplace and Health survey are based on responses from a nationally representative sample of more than 1,600 adult workers who were interviewed via phone during the first…

Low wages certainly impact a person’s health, from where people live to what they eat to how often they can visit a doctor. And low and stagnant wages certainly contribute to poverty, which is a known risk factor for poor health and premature mortality. But should low wages be considered an occupational health hazard?
Health economist J. Paul Leigh thinks that they should. In an article published in May in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM), Leigh, a professor of health economics at the University of California-Davis, and Roberto De Vogli, a global health professor…

At San Jose Mercury News, Louis Hansen reports on the “hidden” workforce of foreign workers that helped expand a Fremont plant for car manufacturer Tesla. The story begins with Gregor Lesnik, an unemployed electrician from Slovenia, who, according to his visa application, was supposed to work in South Carolina. Hansen writes:
The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job in Silicon Valley. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for one of the world’s most sophisticated companies, Tesla Motors.
Lesnik’s three-month tenure ended a year…

Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers.
About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a 10-minute rest break for every four hours of work. On its face, it seems like an incredibly simple and logical request, especially considering the…

At Reveal, Christina Jewett investigates the gaping holes in California’s workers’ compensation system that make it so vulnerable to fraud and leave workers in the dark about the bogus care being charged in their names. She begins the article comparing the workers’ comp system to Medicare:
When Medicare makes rules, it has a strong incentive to encourage doctors, pharmacists and others to follow them: money.
The purse strings are not held nearly as tightly in California’s workers’ compensation system, in which a division of power creates the first major hurdle.
Lawmakers make rules. The state…

You know how opponents of paid sick leave and raising the minimum wage always cite resistance in the business community? Well, in turns out that such resistance might be closer to a marketing gimmick rather than a genuine reflection of employer sentiment.
Yesterday, the Center for Media and Democracy released a leaked internal poll of 1,000 top-level business executives nationwide, many of whom are members of their local or state chambers of commerce. Here’s what the poll, which was commissioned by the Council of State Chambers and conducted by LuntzGlobal, found: 80 percent supported raising…

At Slate, Michelle Chen writes about the experiences of hotel housekeepers in Miami during spring break. The story starts with Adelle Sile, a housekeeper at the four-star Fontainebleau Miami Beach:
Around this time of year, thanks to the influx of spring break and Easter break vacationers, the time (Sile) has to clean each room during her eight-hour shift gets squeezed as guests stretch their mornings to the final minutes before checkout. When she does finally get in, she sometimes opens the door to find vomit, empty bottles, crack pipes, marijuana buds, and makeshift mattresses of cushions…

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